Light pollution overtakes the ranch

Late again to a yesterthread. Oh, but I have to.

See, the old family ranch was really rural when I first moved there in '73. One red light on a tower far on the horizon, that was it. Sure was nice for the Mrs & me in the early years, but we had to leave for reasons too dumb to go into here, and lived in her native Chicago, where the orange phosphor glow blots out everything.

Seventeen years ago when Mrs Webworker and the kids and I moved back, the county had put up ugly double street lights at the curves east and west of us and there were more neighbors with porch lights on. Still, it was rural.

Then, just like #274 CAC said, the family across the road put up a streetlight-style light. Then they sold half their property and on top of the new big two-story house was a searchlight that beams across our place. Since we get some tree cover from the North and our home mostly faces South, it was still almost tolerable until, just in the last year, the neighbors in that direction built a new barn and put up yet one more dam' streetlight, and their kids leave all the rest of the place ablaze much of the night.

Oh, how I would love to just use all those streetlights for target practice, but as Mr. Nixon once famously recorded himself saying, "We could do that.... But it would be wrong."

Nor will I enrich lawyers by attempting to sue anybody to recover my darkness. That battle is lost. Three-quarters of a mile away, one of the old ranches suddenly turned into a housing addition practically overnight, and is still growing. The big city 50 miles (and shrinking) South looks like a great orange nuclear glow most nights, and the smaller local town North keeps blazing toward us, getting broader, longer, and brighter and brighter.

So the ranch moved from gray to green-yellow in forty years without changing places. Can't leave. It's home. Must endure. Siiiiigh! Maybe after the Yellowstone Volcano, or the Mexican Holocaust, or the Obamageddon, or whatever the big doom is, we will see God's universe again as it was surely meant to be seen. Harsh, that.

Somebody mentioned Korea. Here's the picture. Easy to spot the DMZ. And that only dot of light North of it is Kim Il Jong's big-screen TV.